Full Title:God Particle is 'Found': Scientists at Cern Expected to Announce on Wednesday Higgs Boson Particle Has Been Discovered

Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed.

Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.

Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland.

The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results - so they are 99.99995 per cent sure - such is the significance of the results.

He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'

The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass.

Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.

The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons  sub-atomic particles  together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The Higgs boson is often referred to as "the God particle" by the media, after the title of Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

Lederman said he gave it the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," but jokingly added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."

Lederman is a scientist. But you're right. It's mostly journalists who call it that these days.

14
posted on 07/03/2012 8:34:21 PM PDT
by Moonman62
(The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)

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